BATTLE FOR SUPREMACY
WHEN a borough had won from its lord full rights of self-government,
its battles were not yet over. The next effort of the town authorities
was to secure complete power over all the inhabitants within their
walls, so that they might compel all alike to submit to the town
courts, and to bear their share of burdensome duties, such as the
payment of taxes, the keeping watch and ward, the defence of the town,
the maintenance of its trade, or the enlargement of its liberties—in
fact to take their part as good citizens in all that concerned the
common weal.
For all towns alike, whatever were their chartered rights, had to
reckon not only with their own lord of the manor, but with the great
people, whether king or noble or bishop or abbot, or perhaps all of
them together, who might own a part of the land within their walls,
and might all assert their various and conflicting rights, and
multiply officials of every kind with courts and prisons and gallows,
to vindicate the lord’s authority. Thus in Warwick in the eleventh
century, when the population was scarcely over a thousand, the King
held a hundred and thirteen houses, and various lords and prelates
owned a hundred and twelve, while there were nineteen independent
burgesses who had the right of sac and soc. So also in the time of
Edward the First there were five gallows in Worcester and the district
immediately round the city. One belonged to the town, another to the
bishop, and a third to the Earl of Gloucester, while two more were
set up by the abbots of Pershore and Westminster who held property in
the borough; all of which lords and prelates had the right of hanging
thieves and rioters in this little community of about two thousand
inhabitants.[576]
A new municipality, face to face with these traditional claims, and
powerless before the customary rights of property, could only fall
back on friendly treaties by which both sides might win advantage
from peaceable compromise. As soon as the burghers had won chartered
privileges of trade and freedom from toll throughout the kingdom, they
had something to offer to their neighbours, and the bargaining began.
They could propose to grant protection and a share in their privileges,
and would demand in return that the tenants of alien lords should
contribute to their taxes and take part in public duties, and perhaps
acknowledge, in some respects at all events, the authority of their
courts. But the progress of the negociations and their final result
underwent considerable modifications, according as the townspeople had
to deal with the constable of the King’s castle; with some lord who
held property in the borough; or with an ecclesiastical settlement,
whether cathedral or monastery, planted within the liberties.
I. The Castle Fee was a bit of the royal territory altogether
independent of the municipality. In Bristol, for example, the castle
had its own market at its gate; and its inhabitants were exempt from
the town justice, so that if one of the tenants of the fee committed
a crime he was sent to Gloucester thirty miles distant instead of
being tried in Bristol itself. Since the castle fee lay outside the
jurisdiction of the town, its ditches became the refuge of felons and
malefactors flying from the bailiffs, and as late as 1627 it was stated
that two hundred poor persons were dwelling within the precincts who
mostly lived by begging, besides a number of outlaws, excommunicated
people, and offenders who found them a hiding place, and when soldiers
and sailors were impressed great multitudes of able men “fled thither
as to a place of freedom, where malefactors live in a lawless
manner.”[577] From his position as the king’s lieutenant the governor
or Constable of the Castle in important frontier or seaport towns was
a very great official, with an authority as military commander which
gave him the right of interference in local affairs, and whose power
might easily prove a real danger to municipal institutions.[578] In
Bristol, where the mayors after their election “did fetch and take
their oath and charge at the castle gate” from the constable as the
representative of the King, he was practically the official arbiter in
any crisis of town politics, and when a revolt of the commons broke out
in 1312 against a handful of merchants who controlled the municipal
government, the party in power at once claimed the constable’s help
against their fellow-townsmen. Thereupon the commons assaulted the
castle and built forts against it, so that the forces of three counties
which were marched to the rescue by their sheriffs could not quell the
riot; but the castle party finally triumphed, the insurrection was
violently put down, twelve burgesses banished, the rule of those who
had usurped privileges claimed by the whole commonalty confirmed, and
the enemy of the Bristol burghers, Lord Maurice of Berkeley, appointed
by the King “custos of the castle and town.”[579]
It was only however in a few boroughs that exceptional military
difficulties made the post of governor one of great or permanent
authority, as for instance in Bristol or Southampton. And even in
these towns a good understanding was before long established between
king and burghers, and powers exercised by royal officers which
impeded the free developement of municipal life were withdrawn without
jealous alarms on the sovereign’s side, or prolonged agitation on the
part of the town. The Bristol mayors were freed by royal charter from
the necessity of taking their oath from the constable in 1345. And
in towns such as Norwich, where military considerations early became
of comparatively little importance, the castle tenants were made to
contribute to the city taxes in the thirteenth century, and in the
course of the next hundred years, were put unreservedly under the
control of the city authorities.[580]
II. There were not very many cases where a lay lord became a formidable
enemy to municipal freedom, either from the extent of his property
in a town, or from his power of enforcing his claims. Such disputes
as did arise were settled in various ways by purchase or friendly
compact, or by gaining from the Crown a charter which conferred such
rights of control as were necessary for discipline and order. Boroughs
on the royal demesne naturally found themselves supported by the King
in urging these demands, but the appeal to force always lay behind
the legal settlement, and there was occasionally a serious battle
before the question of supremacy was finally decided. A bitter fight
was waged between Bristol[581] and the lords of Berkeley, who owned
Redcliffe, and claimed the river where they had built a quay as part
of their lordship; who had their own courts and their own prison; who
held their own markets and fair; and who broke the Bristol weights and
measures, and refused to take the measures of assize from the mayor
even though in such matters he acted as the King’s marshal. They fought
long and fiercely for their power, even after a royal charter in 1240
had given the jurisdiction over Redcliffe to the mayor.[582] In 1305
an energetic young lord Maurice of Berkeley to whom his father had
given Redcliffe Street tried to assert his rights, but at the ringing
of the common bell the Bristol men assembled, broke into Maurice’s
house, took away a prisoner from him, and refused to allow him to hold
any court, or to buy and sell any wares in Redcliffe Street. Upon this
the young lord, appearing with “great multitudes of horse and foot,”
forced the burgesses to do suit to him, and cast those who refused
into a pit, while the women who came to help their husbands in the
fray were trodden under foot. He set free prisoners from the Bristol
gaol, assaulted Bristol burgesses at Tetbury fair, claimed dominion
over the Severn, and seized the Bristol ships. All this did Maurice,
“than whom a more martial knight, and of a more daring spirit, of the
age of twenty-four years, the kingdom nor scarce the Christian world
then had;” and the mayor and burgesses left King and Parliament no rest
with their petitions, telling of outrage after outrage committed by
him, till commissioners were appointed to examine their complaints, and
to Lord Maurice the sequel of this angry business was a fine of 1,000
marks, afterwards commuted to service with the King’s army with ten
horsemen. A few years later moreover the Bristol men found opportunity
to avenge their bitter grudge, for when he was taken in rebellion the
mayor and the commonalty, “out of an inveterate hatred and remembrance
of former passages,” threw into the common gaol every man who was even
suspected of having adhered to the faction of Maurice.[583] Troubles
again broke out in 1331, and the mayor and burgesses gathered at the
ringing of the common bell for an assault on a Lord Thomas of Berkeley,
destroyed his tumbrill and pillory, carried his bailiff to the Guild
Hall, and forced him to swear that he would never again execute any
judgements in the courts. The next year however the town, “taking the
advantage of the time while the said lord was in trouble about the
murder of King Edward the Second in his castle of Berkeley,” settled
the matter for ever by an opportune payment to the King of £40, for
which the mayor and burgesses obtained a confirmation of all their
charters, and especially that which granted that Redcliffe Street
should be within their jurisdiction.
No sooner was the dispute finally decided than rancour quickly died
away, and the burgesses of Bristol settled down into the most friendly
relations with Berkeley castle. The lords of Berkeley took to trading
in wool and corn and wine, and went partners with Bristol men in
robbing carracks of Genoa as well as in lawful traffic.[584] So far had
the wheel of fortune turned that one of the lords who made a treaty of
peace with the Earl and Countess of Shrewsbury meekly appeared before
the mayor and council of Bristol to give surety;[585] and when he went
out to fight at Nibley the Bristol merchants sent men to his help.[586]
The alliance was cemented by marriage when a Berkeley in 1475 took
to wife a daughter of the mayor of Bristol;[587] and when she died
in 1517 the mayor, the master of the Guild, the aldermen, sheriffs,
chamberlains, and wardens of Bristol, and thirty-three crafts, followed
the coffin with two hundred torches—altogether a multitude of five or
six thousand people. A “drinking” was made by the family for the mayor
and his brethren in St. Mary’s Hall, at which they were entertained
with a first course of cakes, comfits, and ale, followed by another
of marmalade, snoket, red wine, and claret, and a third of wafers and
blanch powder, with romney and muscatel; “and I thank God,” wrote the
steward, “no plate nor spoons was lost, yet there was twenty dozen
spoons.”[588]
III. Ecclesiastical corporations also nominally held their property in
the various towns by the usual feudal tenure, just like the lay lords;
and when a borough formally stated its theoretic relations with them
both lay and spiritual lords were put on exactly the same level. The
“Customs” of Hereford show us the ideal view of these relations as the
burghers liked to picture them. “Fees” within the walls[589] were held
by both ecclesiastical and lay lords, whose tenants desired a share in
the city privileges, and the Hereford men classed them all together
under a common description. “There are some lords and their tenants
who are dwellers and holders of lands and tenements within the said
bounds, which they hold by a certain service which is called ‘liberum
feodum’; because long ago they besought us that they might be of us,
and they would be rated and taxed with us, and they are free among us
concerning toll and all other customs and services by us made, but
concerning their foreign services which they do, or ought to do, and of
old have done, their lords are not excluded by us nor by our liberties;
for we never use to intermix ourselves with them in any things touching
those tenures, but only with those which concern us, or their tenures
which for a time hath been of our condition.”[590] Tenants still bound
to render feudal services to their lords were not reckoned among the
true aristocracy of the freemen, who in admitting them to a limited
fellowship marked their sense of the difference of status between the
free burgher and the man who was but half emancipated; “and such men
ought not to be called citizens or our fellow citizens ... because they
are ‘natives,’ or born in the behalf of their lords, and do hold their
tenements by foreign services and are not burgesses.” It was only when
a tenant bought a house in the city and was in scot and lot with the
citizens, that they allowed that he “is free and of our condition; but
let him take heed to himself that he depart not from the city to any
place into the power of his lord.”[591]
But the municipality was perfectly firm in the assertion of the
authority which it had a right to exercise over all those who were
admitted to the privileges of the common trade, and took a very decided
tone with the spiritual as well as with the lay lords. To the Hereford
burghers it was obvious that the ecclesiastical tenants only enjoyed
a share in the town liberties by the grace of the citizens, and in
virtue of “a composition betwixt us and them, which we for reverence
to God and to the Church our mother had granted the same unto them;
and also for divers alms to be given to our citizens and other poor
and impotent of our city in an almshouse by the keeper of the same
for ever. And it was not our intentions that these men, the tenants
of the bishop, dean, and chapter should have nor enjoy our laws and
customs, unless after the same manner as we enjoy them”—that is, as
they went on carefully to explain, every one must acknowledge law as
well as privilege, and be subject like the citizens to authority. They
were all to be obedient to the Bailiff for the execution of the King’s
writs; nor could they claim any immunities or independent jurisdiction
in the King’s highway, seeing that all offenders taken there were to
be judged by the city Bailiff. If the peace or the tranquillity of
Hereford was disturbed by the tenants of any fee, the city Bailiff,
“taking with him the bailiff of that fee and twelve of the most
discreetest and stoutest men of the whole city,” might “by all way of
rigour” compel the offenders to come before them, and force them to end
their discords and make amends; if they refused, the whole community
“shall account and hold them as rebels; and that they come not among
them in their congregations.”[592] All bailiffs, whether of Church
estates or others, were bound to help the chief Bailiff of the city in
apprehending thieves and malefactors and keeping order. A vagabond,
even if he were an ecclesiastical tenant, who made a noise at night “to
the terror of his fellow-citizens,” might be taken up by any inhabitant
and brought to the city jail till one o’clock the next day; when, in
polite recognition of the lower jurisdictions, he was solemnly handed
over in a public place to the bailiff of his own fee, by him to be kept
in prison for a day and a night, and then returned to the city prison,
“there to stay until he hath made amends as the Bailiff and commonalty
shall think fit.” The tenants of the various fees were allowed to
plead in the town courts at their pleasure, a privilege not granted to
aliens; and in matters touching frankpledge, or anything “which could
not be amended in the courts of those lords,” the city claimed rights
of arbitration, and power to determine such cases “according to the
laws of the city and not according to the customs, unless it be by
special favour of the commonalty.”[593] All questions concerning lands
and tenements in the city were to be decided by the free citizens only;
and if ecclesiastical tenants refused to submit to the jurisdiction of
the city magistrates and absented themselves from the court, “then our
chief Bailiff, calling unto him six or more witnesses of his citizens,
shall go to the cathedral church, and there before the chapter shall
notify or declare the disobedience of their bailiffs and of their
tenants.” If the canons would not assist or agree, the Bailiff should
announce that he must then proceed himself to administer full justice,
though “by his will or knowledge he would not hurt the liberties
of their mother the Church.” This concession to ecclesiastical
sensibilities was apparently looked on by the men of Hereford as a
proof of fine magnanimity. “And it was not wont so to be done, but that
there was a composition had between us, which we for the reverence of
God and the tranquillity of their tenants and our citizens, had granted
unto them.”
All this story, however, comes to us from the side of the town, and
has something of the ring of a lordly municipal pride; it almost sounds
like an ideal view of the compromise between the contracting powers as
conceived by the burghers, and one to which the Church party must have
demurred. At any rate by whatever means the municipality of Hereford
had won a jurisdiction of this sort over the bishop’s tenants, it was
singular in the possession of such authority, which has no parallel in
towns like Canterbury, York, Lincoln, Norwich, Exeter, and many more.
But the situation, even as the citizens put it, is so complicated in
its arrangements that we could scarcely wonder if a state of truce
depending on provisions so elaborate should under provocation be
transformed into a state of open war; nor can we question the wisdom of
townspeople everywhere in making it their fixed purpose to establish
one undivided and supreme law for the government of each community. How
important the question at issue really was to the town’s life we may
see from the story of Winchester.
The mayor of Winchester was at the head of what seems, on paper at
least, a powerful and elaborate corporation, worthy of a great city
which held itself to have been built “in the age of the world 2995,
ninety-nine years before the building of Rome,” and “environed with
stone walls” exactly 533 years later.[594] A common assembly met twice
a year. There were two coroners and two constables, six aldermen of
the wards with their six beadles, a town clerk and four serjeants,
a council of twenty-four elected every year, and four auditors of
this council, besides a body of twelve jurors chosen whenever there
was necessity, who sat at “the Pavilion,” and with whom the mayor
perambulated the liberties to view the rivulets and rivers.[595] The
boundaries of the city were apparently marked out by a rough square
formed by the walls and ditch; but to the mayor and aldermen of the
fifteenth century, the idea that their authority should reach as far
as the limits allowed by the girth of the walls would have seemed a
far-off counsel of perfection.
For right across the city from the east to the west gates stretched the
High Street, cutting the town into two equal halves; and to the south
of the High Street one may say roughly that the mayor had no authority
at all. Near the west gate stood the King’s castle, where municipal
law of course did not run. Beside the castle lay the great convent of
S. Swithun, and next to it the cathedral, both fenced round by a wall
which shut out all lay jurisdiction or intrusion of any kind. Nearer
to the east gate lay the palace of the bishop, who was also of course
exempt from secular interference, and who ruled with supreme authority
over the bishop’s Soke that stretched away beyond the gate, and took
tolls of all merchandise that passed along the river.[596] His tenants
while remaining outside municipal control had still the right to buy
and sell all kinds of merchandize in the city which according to the
burghers’ complaint was to their hurt and loss; and the exceeding
difficulty of any regulation of trade in the midst of this competition
of privileged workers, with the ruin of the city treasury which it
threatened, are shown by a quarrel between the bishop and the burghers
as to a street which the bishop had claimed as his property in 1275;
for when people discovered that in that liberty so appropriated they
paid nothing, since the city bailiff could not enter it to make
distraint, nearly all the clothworkers forthwith withdrew themselves
from the other streets and went to live there to the manifest loss of
the community, and the great profit of the bishop.[597]
The northern part of the town was more than half given up to fields
and gardens, the shops and houses of traders and artizans forming but
a narrow settlement that gathered closely along the central street and
the lanes that opened from it. And even of this district a part was
wholly withdrawn from the city jurisdiction. The Queens, whose “morning
gift” Winchester was, lived “tax free” in the Queen’s House opposite
the King’s palace near the west gate, and took rent and tolls from the
row of Queen’s stalls on the High Street. At the east gate was another
belt of ecclesiastical property—the settlements of the Franciscans and
Dominicans,—and next to them a group of poor houses depending on S.
Swithun’s.[598] Right in the middle of the town, opposite the Guild
Hall in the High Street, was the liberty of “Godbeate” belonging to S.
Swithun’s, where the writ of the King or the authority of the city had
no power; and whose church formed a sanctuary always open for ill-doers
flying from municipal justice. The very curfew-bell which hung in its
tower rang out from land that defied the mayor’s authority.[599]
Winchester had not even control of its own gates. The bishop had charge
of one; and two were in the hands of the convent, which in times of
civil war could freely admit within the city walls the armies of the
side opposed to the townsfolk.[600] Even the commerce of the place
was taken out of the burghers hands. Not only did the bishop take
tolls of the river traffic, but once a year when the great fair of S.
Giles’ took place he assumed supreme command in Winchester; for the
time all civic government was altogether suspended; the bishop closed
all shops in and round the town; traders coming with their cloth and
woollen goods, their wines, their pottery, their brass-work, or their
eastern spices, were subject to his jurisdiction, and handed over to
him the biggest share of the profits, which he divided with the various
religious establishments in the city.[601] At other times the King’s
chamberlains and the King’s clerk of the market regulated business in
their master’s interest, and collected the dues of the market and tolls
on every load carried by man or horse into the town.[602]
Winchester suffered also from the memory of its ancient state as the
capital and residence of the West Saxon Kings; and its mayor almost
alone among the mayors of English towns in the fifteenth century had to
go to London to take his oath of office from the King’s judges,[603]
just as the mayor of London does to this day. He could win neither
freedom nor independence. At home he was beset with dangers; he might
be imprisoned by the King for one offence, and punished by the bishop
for another.[604] Against such odds as the burghers had to face it
was almost hopeless for any corporation to contend; and the helpless
townsfolk could but show their impatience and discontent in petty
quarrels with the convent as to the site of a market, or blindly do
battle for worthless Kings such as Henry the Third or Edward the
Second if the monks took up the opposite party.[605] The struggle
for independence has no fine record of stirring incidents; but that
there should have been any conflict at all before the settling down of
quiescence and final apathy is a striking instance of the vitality and
persistence of municipal institutions.
It is impossible not to attribute to the hopeless situation of the
municipality before the rival authorities in the city, and especially
the powerful lords of convent and cathedral, much of the calamity of
its history. For at a time when prosperity was generally increasing,
its fortunes steadily sank. In 1450 the citizens drew a terrible
picture of the local distress, not in the vague phrases which we meet
with elsewhere when for some special purpose happier boroughs put on a
temporary show of distress, but with a minute exactness which betrays
the truth and the whole measure of their suffering. Winchester, they
declared, “is become right desolate.” Nine hundred and ninety-seven
houses stood empty, and in seventeen parish churches there was no
longer any service. A list is given of eleven streets “that be fallen
down in the city of Winchester within eighty years last passed”; and in
each case an account is added of the number of householders that had
formerly lived in the street, a hundred, a hundred and forty, or two
hundred, as the case might be, where there were now but two or three
left. Since the last Parliament held there eighty-one households had
fallen. “The desolation of the said poor city is so great, and yearly
falling, for there is such a decay and unwin, that without gracious
comfort of the King our sovereign lord, the mayor and the bailiffs
must of necessity cease, and deliver up the city and the keys into
the King’s hands.”[606] To produce a distress such as this no doubt
industrial causes were at work, and Winchester probably suffered as
Canterbury did from changes in the woollen manufacture and in trade
routes. But nowhere in any considerable city do we find a parallel
to the utter ruin of this unfortunate community. Nowhere, on the
other hand, were the conditions of municipal life so fatal, if once
prosperity began to dwindle or the pressure of outward circumstances
became such as to call on the resources of the people. Through the
breaking up of the city into separate and independent fragments
the whole burden of any difficulty had to be borne by the little
company of inhabitants governed by the mayor; and so heavily did the
common municipal charges and expenses fall on the scanty population
of burghers shut into the narrow area which was under municipal
government, and from which alone the authorities could gather the
fee-farm and the royal taxes, maintain the bridge and walls, provide
householders for the nightly watch, and furnish men and arms for the
defence of the city; and we do not wonder that the inhabitants at last
began to renounce, or refuse to accept, a franchise which brought such
formidable responsibilities, or that they sought to escape from a city
doomed to ruin. An attempt was made in 1430 to revive manufacture
and commerce by an invitation to all kinds of traders and artificers
to come and do business in Winchester free of toll.[607] But the
experiment in free trade was quickly abandoned, probably because the
corporation could not meet the heavy yearly expenses without the
customary taxes levied on trade;[608] and in 1450 the citizens laid a
petition before Henry the Sixth, praying him to consider the extent of
their distress. They were bound, they said, to pay yearly a rent of
112 marks to the King, “for the which said fee-farm so to be paid your
bailiffs have little or naught of certainty to raise it of, but only
of casualties and yearly leases £40 or more.” There was further a sum
of £50 10_s._ 4_d._ for the tax of the fifteenth, “the which when it
is levyable, some one man in the said city is set unto four marks and
some five marks, because your said city is desolate of people.” Then
came a sum of 60_s._ to be paid yearly to the Magdalen Hospital;[609]
and besides that there were the expenses of two burgesses to Parliament
who cost 4_s._ a day; “and also the great charges and daily costs the
which your said poor city beareth about the enclosing and murage of
your said city.”[610] To add to all their trouble a grant which the
king had made to the municipality in 1439 of forty marks from the
ulnage and subsidies of woollen cloths had been withdrawn again; and
the commonalty sadly entreat that it may be restored.
The King allowed the payment of the forty marks during the next fifty
years, and Winchester made one or two further attempts at mending its
fortunes. The people of Southampton had as long ago as 1406 succeeded
in obtaining a license from the bishop of Winchester, to buy and sell
within their town during the fair of St. Giles;[611] and the mayor and
community of Winchester perhaps hoped to follow this example. In 1451
they raised a debate as to the franchises and customs of the fair,
and interfered with the bishop’s privileges; but their usual ill luck
pursued them and they were obliged to submit and give a promise that
he should never again be disturbed from having the keeping of the city
and the customs aforesaid.[612] A few years later a transient gleam of
hope was cast across the unhappy town when the Italian merchants were
driven out of London in 1456, and in this sudden emergency hired the
“great old mansions”[613] which the Winchester traders had allowed to
fall into decay, putting the owners to heavy expenses for repairs. But
they seem never to have occupied the mansions after all. Perhaps they
were disheartened by the sense of failing trade and oppressive taxes;
or they possibly feared the dangers that might come to them in a town
that had never been allowed powers to govern and defend and deal fairly
by its own townsfolk. In any case they left the big empty houses to go
to Southampton, and Winchester was none the better.[614]
Winchester was an extreme instance of difficulties which were felt
in every other town in a greater or less degree. For scarcely any
important borough was without some ecclesiastical settlement within
its walls, and everywhere the dispute took the gravest form. With the
King or with a neighbouring lord the boroughs might make terms of
peace, or impose conditions as conquerors, but their most imposing
demonstrations were inevitably routed before the power of the Church.
Outbreaks of popular fury in which from time to time the irritation
of the burghers found expression have often been represented as
symptoms of a spirit of malice and misrule by which an ignorant mob was
instigated to attack the most beneficent institution known to their
society and with no justification save from their lawless temper seek
to appropriate to themselves its privileges and possessions. But the
causes of the conflict were more valid and serious. As the instances
given in the next chapter prove, the burghers learned by a genuine
experience to gauge the beneficence of the Church’s claims to temporal
authority. There does not seem to have been in England, as there often
was abroad, the additional stimulus of religious revolt, for the
practical townspeople apparently did not find the slightest difficulty
in distinguishing between spiritual influence and secular jurisdiction,
mainly perhaps because the power of the ecclesiastical potentates in
England was of so limited a kind as to awaken but a moderate fear
and equally moderate excitement. But in face of the secular problem
created by the presence of a rival authority ruling over half the
space enclosed in the town walls—an authority with which no permanent
agreement could ever be concluded and which was manifestly fatal to
the dignity or the success of municipal government—the boroughs were
forced, as a mere matter of self-preservation, into insistent and
reiterated demands that this double rule should be abolished, and
that there should be but one undivided and supreme control in each
community for civil affairs. When the pole-axes and daggers with
which they at first sought to enforce their convictions were laid
aside, they turned to the law-courts and the paper wars of Westminster
to seek a remedy for their grievances; and it is in the records of
trials from the middle of the fifteenth century to the Reformation in
which the pleadings of both sides may be heard that we find the real
justification of the burghers’ claim to civic supremacy, and of their
determined assaults on the political independence of ecclesiastical
communities.